ABSTRACT
Biotechnology offers an increasing potential for the production of goods to meet various human needs. Enzyme technology - a sub-field of biotechnology - is associated with the application of enzymes as the tools of industry, agriculture and medicine. Although the earliest reports concerning exploitation of enzymes were documented in the late 1800s, true industrial application of these extremely efficient and highly specific biocatalysts only began in earnest in the 1960s. The use of a range of enzymes is critical to the success of many pharmaceutical, biotechnological and industrial processes. They can be harnessed to avoid or minimize the harmful effects of environmental pollution. In recent years, it has become a global challange. Many traditional industries are the prime targets of the environmentalists for their crusade against pollution. Biotechnological processes involving microbial enzymes, such as pectinases (Rombouts and Pilnik, 1980; Alkorta et al., 1998; Hoondal et al., 2002), amylases (Pandey et al., 2000; Gupta et al., 2003; Tonkova, 2006), cellulases (Csiszar et al., 2001), xylanases (Prade, 1996; Subramaniyan and Prema, 2002), α-galactosidase (Clarke et al., 2000), glucose isomerase (Bhosale et al., 1996) and ligninases (Aitken and Irvine, 1989), can be expected to expand into many spheres of the industry replacing existing chemical or mechanical processes in the not too distant future. Enzyme
technology not only provides an economically viable alternative, but is also environment friendly (Viikari et al., 2001; Hoondal et al., 2002).
